On the Move

By Jerry Pournelle

June 20, 2005

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Column 299 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Travel Power

We had upgrade seats to Business Class (which was indistinguishable from First Class on our particular flight) for our trip to Rome on Delta Airlines. We chose Delta largely because we had a lot of credit card points with that airline, so the upgrade was comparatively inexpensive. That's always important, but this time more so, because this was a research trip for a novel, and nothing was on an expense account.

I'd heard that Business and First Class seats often have on-board computer power, so I went on line to the HP sales center and bought a power supply kit for Lisabetta, my HP 1100 TabletPC which goes everywhere with me. Lisabetta used to get an honest 4 hours of useful battery life, but I've used that battery a lot and over time the battery life has dropped to just a bit more than 3 hours: unfortunately a natural consequence of frequent charging and discharging. (Note that this is about 25 percent degradation; the Mac has lost 45 percent of its battery life in about the same time with less use because it almost never got discharged down to empty.)

One solution to battery degradation that is to buy a new battery, and I've since bought one, but having on-board power is even better. Besides, the travel power supply pack not only lets me plug into airplanes, but directly into my car's power outlet.

Of course I've always had gizmos that plug into the cigar lighter on the car and deliver 110 VAC output. Well back in the 1980's I recall writing a column using a Zenith laptop while my wife drove the Bronco, or maybe it was its predecessor the Scout, to a COMDEX in Las Vegas. The Zenith was plugged into its power supply and that was plugged into the converter which plugged into the cigar lighter outlet. I used that lashup for many years, but it's inefficient, the converter gets hot, and there are a lot of wires to avoid; better if the computer power supply can plug in directly.

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